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The history of places of remembrance, which focuses primarily on commemorative ceremonies, pays little attention to the ordinary life of such heritage sites, the meanings they assume over time, and the practices they help to anchor outside of the cyclical rhythm of commemoration. That is precisely what this article sets out to explore. By drawing on various sources that document everyday life at the École normale supérieure in Paris, this article seeks to reconstruct the commemorative as well as the playful, profane, artistic, and militant practices that surround these monuments, which are sometimes subject to indifference and forgetting; it also examines how these monuments relate to the identity of the ENS community.